Status: Active
Partnership: 6+ years
Resources: 2 FTEs
The Challenge
Transform an engineering culture
For over 65 years, SRC has provided the United States defense and intelligence agencies with research, design, and technology development that protects our nation.
In response to a rapidly changing world, the DoD has ramped up its demand for more usable products, systems, and services to provide service members with a tactical edge against global threats.
To meet this need, SRC leadership engaged Visual Logic to establish and lead a UX Center of Excellence. This effort included recruiting and developing critical skill sets, integrating human-centered design (HCD) into the existing quality management system (QMS)—particularly within engineering and product development—and providing communication and change-management support to ensure successful adoption across the organization.
The Work
Here’s how we helped SRC
We defined the organization’s vision and built a strategic framework to embed human-centered design across teams, systems, and workflows. Our approach combined a phased adoption roadmap with practical demonstration—using pilot projects, research, and early product contributions to show clear value and align leadership around shared priorities.
To ensure lasting impact, we institutionalized HCD through better processes, capability building, and clear standards. We grew internal talent, elevated organizational skills, and established communication channels and partnerships that reinforced HCD as a core element of product quality and engineering practice.
Key activities:
Developed a phased plan and roadmap to support both the technical and cultural adoption of HCD over time.
Acted as the foundational UX team, contributing key product outputs to demonstrate the value of HCD throughout the organization.
Co-developed and improved organizational processes to firmly establish HCD as an integral element of engineering operations.
Built UX team capacity by hiring and training new talent, and designed HCD education programs that elevated competencies across the organization.
Developed a long-term communication strategy and built strong partnerships to guide and support the adoption of HCD across projects.
Established HCD standards and benchmarks that elevated human interaction to a key measure of product quality.
Led a series of leadership workshops that identified high-value business areas for applying HCD and advancing design maturity.
Conducted employee-experience research to pinpoint gaps and friction points across product, system, and service design.
Executed pilot projects that demonstrated the value of HCD and built organization-wide buy-in.
“[Visual Logic] didn’t come in with a one-size-fits-all roadmap and try to shoehorn our company into some preconceived notion of what we should be.”
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Eric Valentine Director of Mission & Strategy, SRC Inc.
The Impact
An up-leveled organization that ensures engineering innovations are usable in the field
The benefits of becoming a more human-centric organization are wide ranging. At SRC, the first objective was to ensure the high-end technology engineers built were also highly adopted and used—and, ensure they had the internal ability to deliver on that time and time again.
The projects and programs that utilized the UX team consistently earned high marks on usability (both qualitatively and quantitatively). The HCD process itself unlocked product potential through new research methods and a different style of customer engagement. The breadth of impact is growing:
Product Usability & Demand: The numbers speak for themselves. On average, products that we helped design at SRC had higher usability scores. One product with prior testing saw an approximate 25% increase in scores. (That’s like going from a C- to an A.)
Strategic Facilitation: Helping the organization and everyone within to understand and own their impact to the company’s operational success – from first-year engineers all the way up to the C-Suite.
Confident Decisions: Embedding research into all efforts gave stakeholders confidence in design and utilizing HCD practices, critically influencing project work and internal growth.
Brand Leadership: As part of our product design support, we created a design system to accelerate timelines and build a more consistent product experience across SRC. Click here to learn about the design system Their growth in design maturity will continue to deliver more value for the warfighter, their customer, and internal operations.
